Apr012011

A Glimpse of Upcoming Exchange 2010 SP2 Features

Microsoft announced some new features planned for Exchange 2010 SP2:

OWA Automobile Edition: Exchange team and a major US automaker will soon announce OWA integration into new line of cars to maximize end-user productivity. Car windshields are to be replaced with LCDs (who needs windshields anyway?) Additionally, when it’s time for oil change, you’ll get a reminder popup.

Twitter-Ready Mail: SP2 will enforce a maximum email length of 140 characters to ensure all email is Twitter-ready. If you’ve more than 140 characters of things to say, you’re clearly egotistical and self-centered. To help you save the characters, we’ll also enforce all email to be in clear text format. An 80-page whitepaper with business-ready abbreviations to use will be published at release time.

Boss OOFs: Out of Office Assistant (Automatic Replies) now has a “boss” feature, which’ll send a different message to your upward reporting chain in the GAL than everyone else. Now, you can be “out sick with the flu” to your boss while “kicking ass and taking names” in Vegas to your buddies.

Email Etiquette Enforcement (EEE) Agent: will enforce a uniform email etiquette within your organization by allowing you to create Email Etiquette Rules, similar in concept to Transport Rules. Exchange will ship with a few pre-canned Email Etiquette Rules, such as “Exceeded Max Recipients You Should Be Replying To Per Good Email Etiquette” rule. If the offending user replies to “all” on a very large distribution group with something totally meaningless, the system will send a custom DSN to that user every 10 minutes for a week, as a reminder of what he has done. Currently, two DSN wordings that we’re looking at are:5.7.11.1 Srsly? You did that? Will you do it again?

and

5.7.11.1 How do YOU like to have your mailbox filled up with useless replies?

Another EEE rule will detect the number of messages a user sends with a Read Receipt requested, and if it exceeds 10% of all email sent by the user, the EEE agent will respond by automatically modifying all messages received by that user to require a read receipt’.

Automatic Randomized MRM (ARM) Assistant: Based on the success of the MRM feature in Exchange, we’re taking MRM a step further by creating an Automatic Randomized MRM (ARM) Assistant. This takes all of the work out of configuring MRM policies; the Assistant will simply pick messages from your mailbox randomly and archive them for you — at random intervals; to random places. No user or administrator configuration is necessary (or possible).

Active Inbox Rules (AIR) Agent: is a step in this direction, allowing you to manage users’ email based on their past behavior, and reduce TCO. AIR agent interfaces with your helpdesk system and reads the number of “I can’t find my email” tickets created by a user. If the message is found to have been automatically moved by an Inbox rule that the user created, the AIR agent automatically creates a server-side rule to move such items back to the Inbox. This should greatly reduce the number of helpdesk tickets created by the user.

If the user creates any additional rules to move messages, the agent responds by creating server-side rules to move messages from all folders back to the Inbox. This action is completely transparent to the user.

Mobile Read Receipts: Given so many of you now consume email on your mobile devices, we’re positive you’ll find this new mobile feature quite useful. When you receive a message with a read receipt requested on your mobile device, the mobile email client will activate the camera on your mobile device and transmit a video to the sender, really proving you’ve actually read the message. Mobile Read Receipts are sent with important metadata information such as your expressions (visual and verbal), and your GPS coordinates.

Exchange Configuration: we’re making required engineering changes to store Exchange configuration data in public folders, rather than Active Directory. We’re now working through seemingly paradox fact that in order to read that configuration, public folder database needs to be mounted; which requires configuration to be read in the first place. From public folders… which’re not mounted… because configuration is not accessible, as the folders aren’t up at the time.

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Deepak Gupta is a IT & Web Consultant. He is the founder and CEO of diTii.com & DIT Technologies, where he's engaged in providing Technology Consultancy, Design and Development of Desktop, Web and Mobile applications using various tools and softwares. Sign-up for the Email for daily updates. Google+ Profile.